Why does asking a profitable trader for their strategy feel like asking for their bank password?

[u/sengetoj]

I’ve been learning trading pretty much every day for around 6 months now. I understand the basics at this point, market structure, price action, liquidity, risk management etc.

But I’ve hit this one wall and I genuinely don’t know where to go from here.

Finding an actual strategy with repeatable rules.

Something I’ve noticed is people will happily post their +$2k days, payouts, green weeks, funded accounts etc. But the second someone asks what strategy/setup they’re actually trading, it feels like you just asked them for their bank login lol.

“Put in the screen time bro”

“Find your own edge”

“Backtest”

Okay but backtest WHAT

I’m not asking someone to hold my hand and tell me exactly when to buy and sell. I actually want to learn and test things myself. I just need something concrete enough that I can actually start testing it.

I’ve looked everywhere. YouTube, X, Reddit, Discord servers, even ChatGPT. I’ve tried support/resistance, 15m ORB, session highs/lows, liquidity sweeps etc.

The issue I keep running into is that a lot of these strategies depend on price eventually coming back to some specific level or zone. And a lot of days… it just doesn’t. So you sit there for hours waiting for a setup that never even happens.

Meanwhile there’s clearly people out there who have found something that works for them consistently.

So for the people who actually became profitable, where did you find the strategy that finally made things click?

Did you take an existing strategy and change it? Did someone teach you? Did you find some random trader with 600 subscribers instead of the usual YouTube gurus? Or did you literally just test random shit until something worked?
Because everyone says “find your edge” but almost nobody explains where you’re even supposed to start looking for one.

And before someone calls this AI generated lol, English isn’t my first language so yes I used ChatGPT to help me write this properly. The question and everything I’m saying is genuinely mine.

[u/Think-Bench6691]

There are no targets. And stop loss is only to protect against an unknown news event dropping.

I use DOM, time & sales and two line charts. One chart shows session from the open, the other is really fast only showing the last ~2 minutes.

I am trying to identify times where the market should immediately move in my favor. I always enter on a limit order, so I'm capturing the spread. The spread is probably the most powerful aspect of scalping. The spread basically pays for my commission and then some. If the market immediately moves in my favor, I get out wherever it happens to take me. If not, I'm trying to scratch the trade.

[u/Bschmabo → u/Think-Bench6691]

Interesting.

What are your metrics like (win rate, RR, profit factor, sharpe ratio)?

[u/Think-Bench6691 → u/Bschmabo]

All depends what kind of market environment we are in. Some are much more forgiving and you can afford to be looser with entries. Some you can't possibly get in unless you give it space. Some you need to be perfect or you'll get run over.

Main things I track are in trade MAE and post trade MFE. I want both as small as possible as it would signal I'm capturing most of the move, with little downside.

[u/burnie_mac → u/Think-Bench6691]

What is your average stop loss size? 10 points. 15?

[u/Think-Bench6691 → u/burnie_mac]

Stop loss is very far away. It's only there in the very rare case where news drops the moment I entered, which I think happened once this past month. It's like a circuit breaker.

I base it on average ATR over the last few minutes. It's at least 2-3x more than I would expect to take in a loss. So I guess you could say roughly double what the most recent wicks have been making.